Briefs: March 3

Cap Dance: It’s always nice when February ends—no more saccharine cupid-covered cards, and the prospect of summer is suddenly in the less-distant future—but in Santa Fe, March 1 came with the extra bonus of hearings on the state’s proposed emissions cap.

The state Environmental Improvement Board has been working on the cap concept since 2008, when the nonprofit New Energy Economy first petitioned for tighter emissions regulations.

There’s been plenty of back-and-forth since, all of which is conveniently downloadable from the EIB’s website.

Worse: Continued, dogged opposition from a company that loves to tout its greenness: PNM.

In sifting through the comments filed in advance of the March 1 hearing, SFR found a few notable Santa Feans, among them Diane Karp, executive director of the Santa Fe Art Institute.

“As citizens, we have to be responsible not only to our present needs but to a future that will allow us as a nation and human species to live responsibly on the earth,” Karp tells SFR. “For 40 or 50 years, [artists have] been issuing warning calls and concerns about ecology and the sense of human conscience to treat our environment and our earth with respect.”

It’s not every day Karp jumps out in front of the PNM train—not every single day, anyway.

“I’m kind of an activist,” she confesses, laughing.

The Truth Is Out There for 30 Days: The British government must be tired of hearing about how some sheep farmer in Surrey saw flashing lights—you can almost hear the disgust in the news reports that call UFO data “a waste of defense resources.”

So they’re calling it off: From now on, all records of UFO sightings will be destroyed after 30 days.

Back in Santa Fe, the last UFO sighting that didn’t happen 56 years in the future was last November, according to the author of the Texas-based blog Lights in the Sky. The author’s wife was outside at 2:30 am, when she felt “a feeling of electricity ‘all the way through my heart.’” While the wife was swooning, a neighbor’s shed “levitated at least four inches off the ground.”

As for New Mexico record-keeping of extraterrestrial events, Mark Briscoe, who runs the library at the International UFO Museum and Research Center in Roswell, tells SFR the plan across the pond is “ridiculous.”

As for a comparable plan here, that, too, would be “ridiculous, to destroy what we’ve created,” he says of the museum.